10 business process improvement examples

Your organization should never conduct business process improvement in a bubble. Instead, it’s crucial to gain vital information and insight by looking outside your company to peers, partners, and even competitors to see how they optimize processes to achieve business goals. 

Jotform Workflows is a powerful tool that can assist with these improvements. By automating repetitive tasks and reducing manual effort, it helps businesses improve the efficiency of their daily operations. Features like conditional logic, white labeling (for Enterprise customers), and integrated payment processing simplify and streamline workflows.

Here are six ways to improve business processes that may fuel ideas for your own organization’s initiatives.

1. Speeding up approval times

In many process workflows, gaining approval from a manager or business leader is par for the course. This step is typically where many bottlenecks occur because of manual processes, miscommunication, and a lack of visibility into the full process. 

Through process improvement and tools like Jotform Workflows, organizations can not only speed up the approval process but also reduce employees’ downtime while they wait for approvals. In an automated process, employees can ensure the information they provide to managers is complete and accurate, speeding up the process and eliminating the need for managers to backtrack to find the details they need to grant approvals.

2. Reducing data errors 

In processes that require any kind of data entry, there’s a chance someone in the process may enter incorrect or incomplete information. For example, an invoice may have the wrong supplier details, or an email address may be misspelled. 

These errors can not only halt the process, but require people to backtrack to find out what went wrong. Often, the incorrect information is fixed and the process can move forward. But sometimes, employees may not be able to complete the process due to the missing information. 

Improving processes  by eliminating manual data entry will increase your organization’s efficiency.

3. Balancing resource allocation

Another common way to improve a business process is to make sure human resources are allocated well. For example, if a business allocates too many people to a specific part of the process, it may result in excessive employee downtime and expense. 

On the other hand, if the organization allocates too few employees to a section of the process, employees will be overworked, risking burnout. Process improvement can help identify areas of poor resource allocation so your organization can ensure it’s balancing employee time properly throughout the workflow.

4. Improving communication issues

In most modern organizations, employees are overwhelmed with information. There are countless emails, instant messages, and phone calls to field, along with numerous project management or workflow applications to manage. 

With so much information to process each day, employees are bound to miss important details they need to achieve their goals. You can improve business processes by using custom notifications in Jotform Workflows, streamlining communication so that the right employees get the right details at the right time, instead of all employees sifting through multiple communication channels to find exactly what they need.

5. Filling skills gaps

In some organizations, only a handful of employees with specific training and skills can complete certain parts of a process. Problems can arise when those employees are ill, on vacation, or unable to work for any reason. 

Instead of letting processes come to a standstill, train multiple team members to complete all areas of the process. When the subject matter experts are away, then other employees can fill in to ensure the process remains on track.

6. Learning from all employees

An important element of many process improvement methodologies is soliciting feedback from different employees. This is a key way to improve business processes because it can provide valuable insight you may not otherwise get. 

If your competitors seek feedback from all employees but your organization only considers insights from the leadership team, you’ll lack the quality and depth of information needed to improve processes that your competitors have.

With Jotform Enterprise’s white-labeling and customization capabilities, businesses can customize workflows to reflect their unique needs and brand identity, fostering greater engagement from employees and stakeholders alike.

Did these business process improvement examples provide a few ideas that you can apply to your own organization? Remember that improvement should be continuous, and you can always find ways to optimize workflows to better meet your organization’s goals.

7. Seeking fresh perspectives

Sometimes the most valuable insights come from those who are not directly involved in the process. New hires, rotated managers, or even external consultants can often identify inefficiencies or outdated steps that internal teams may overlook. Encouraging these perspectives — and collecting them systematically using tools like Jotform — helps uncover opportunities for meaningful improvements.

Who should you ask for input on processes? You have a few options:

• New hires: Employees who are just getting started with your company will naturally have questions about how things work. Encourage these questions and use them to identify potential improvements in processes, especially older ones.
• Managers: Shuffling managers around to different responsibility areas can often help them see work from a fresh perspective and pinpoint useful process changes.
• Consultants: Sometimes your best bet for improving business processes is hiring an external consultant or consulting firm to systematically review and identify process improvements. Not only do you get an outsider’s perspective, but you also benefit from the specialized experience.

8. Centralizing process-related information

When information is scattered across systems and people, process timelines tend to be longer. People have to hunt down the information they need, which can create unnecessary bottlenecks. When critical information is scattered across platforms or teams, process completion time suffers. Centralizing data — such as customer details, call notes, or internal documentation — helps employees quickly access what they need. Jotform can serve as a central repository that organizes submissions, comments, and attachments in one place.

9. Managing organizational change effectively

It’s not enough to simply change processes. You also have to change people — their knowledge, skills, mindset, and more. Processes can only produce your desired results when the people responsible for those processes are behaving as intended.

When it comes to improving business processes, there’s a multitude of ways to get the job done. Mix and match the ones above, but don’t be afraid to come up with a few ways of your own that fit your organization.

10. Implement relevant solutions

Specific solutions can often jumpstart your process improvement efforts, especially when a solution can tackle multiple process pain points. For example, Jotform, a powerful form builder, offers a wide variety of templates to meet the needs of multiple functional areas. These customizable templates help automate the process of collecting, organizing, and visualizing data to inform decision making.

Consider a few areas where Jotform can help:

• HR: Find templates to aid in hiring, onboarding, and employee management.
• Sales: From leveraging order forms to new customer contracts, the sales team can do a lot with Jotform.
• Marketing: Your marketing team can create valuable surveys and questionnaires.
• IT: Whether it’s bug and issue reporting or internal support requests, Jotform has a form for that.